Gurbet Ölümden Beter

by Nâzım Hikmet

Traducción de Alfredo Varela.
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Nacido en Salónica (Imperio otomado) el 20 de noviembre de 1901, el poeta turco Nazim Hikmet representa una de las cimas de la poesía revolucionaria mundial. A los 19 años sufre su primer exilio como consecuencia de la persecución a que le someten los colonizadores ingleses. Y le persiguen no sólo por sus actividades como miembro del partido nacionalista, sino también por sus poemas, impregnados ya de esa vibración y de esa emotividad que le harían mundialmente famoso. "Comprendí que el poeta —nos dice— debe responder a todos los sentimientos del lector; yo digo: si está enamorado, que me lea; y también si se siente abandonado y quiere consolarse, si está enfermo o le habita la esperanza... Que me lea cualquiera que sea su estado de ánimo y su situación. Y, si quiere alegrarse con mis canciones, que las aprenda y las cante...". Cuando Nazim Hikmet muere en Moscú, el 3 de junio de 1963, como consecuencia de una crisis cardíaca, lo hace como había vivido siempre: de pie. La totalidad de sus condenas sufridas —como miembro del Partido Comunista Turco— suman 56 años, de los que pasó 16 en la cárcel y otros 15 en el exilio. Los poemas que componen este libro fueron escritos entre 1955 y 1957, durante el último y definitivo exilio del poeta, y fueron publicados originariamente en Francia.

187 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1976

About the author

Nazim Hikmet was born on January 15, 1902 in Salonika, Ottoman Empire (now Thessaloníki, Greece), where his father served in the Foreign Service. He was exposed to poetry at an early age through his artist mother and poet grandfather, and had his first poems published when he was seventeen.

Raised in Istanbul, Hikmet left Allied-occupied Turkey after the First World War and ended up in Moscow, where he attended the university and met writers and artists from all over the world. After the Turkish Independence in 1924 he returned to Turkey, but was soon arrested for working on a leftist magazine. He managed to escape to Russia, where he continued to write plays and poems.

In 1928 a general amnesty allowed Hikmet to return to Turkey, and during the next ten years he published nine books of poetry—five collections and four long poems—while working as a proofreader, journalist, scriptwriter, and translator. He left Turkey for the last time in 1951, after serving a lengthy jail sentence for his radical acts, and lived in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, where he continued to work for the ideals of world Communism.

After receiving early recognition for his patriotic poems in syllabic meter, he came under the influence of the Russian Futurists in Moscow, and abandoned traditional forms while attempting to “depoetize” poetry.

Many of his works have been translated into English, including Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse (2009), Things I Didn’t Know I Loved (1975), The Day Before Tomorrow (1972), The Moscow Symphony (1970), and Selected Poems (1967). In 1936 he published Seyh Bedreddin destani (“The Epic of Shaykh Bedreddin”) and Memleketimden insan manzaralari (“Portraits of People from My Land”).

Hikmet died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1963. The first modern Turkish poet, he is recognized around the world as one of the great international poets of the twentieth century.

Reviews

[evrim]

Dağ doruğu deler gider bulutu.
dağ dibinde ak evler kutu kutu,
evdekiler yok mu koklamak isteyen
dağ doruğundan getirdiğim otu?